Plus: why flying is getting worse September 8, 2025 Sign Up | View online IN THIS ISSUE 8 min read 🏚️ Flip fails 🛬 Air annoyances 🥼 Scientific success Nathan Fielder was right: the airline industry has some problems. We explain below. | HBO Worried, perplexed, confused, or just bored? We want to hear from you! Send us a voice memo with your most pressing macro or micro money questions. You can leave a voicemail for us at 226-444-2833 or send a voice memo to tldrpodcast@wealthsimple.com. Thanks! Now, on to the newsletter. —The Editors THE WEEK IN MARKETS The S&P gets some fresh company A bit of a sleepy week for markets — U.S. stocks were flat, the TSX was up thanks (again) to gold — so let’s focus instead on the gossip topic du jour among investors: who’s in and who’s out at the S&P 500. It’s easy to forget that slots on the index aren’t permanent (annual turnover is about 4%, 10-year turnover is 36%) and that people pick which 500 companies to include (i.e., who meet the criteria of being the biggest, most traded, and most representative of the U.S. economy). Snagging a spot is incredibly important, not just because investors automatically buy many trillions of dollars’ worth of stock based on who’s on the list but also because the lineup reflects shifts in what people believe the real economy is right now. So who’s in? U.S. brokerage Robinhood, ad-tech innovator AppLovin, and construction giant Emcor Group. Stocks for all three jumped on the news. They’ll replace Caesars Entertainment, MarketAxess, and Enphase Energy. Getting snubbed hurts. Just ask MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor, whose US$70-billion crypto firm didn’t get the widely predicted phone call, and its stock sank 2%. THE CHART OF THE WEEK WHAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK IMPORTANT Schaden-flipper: the pleasure of watching a home sell for way below asking price. The GTA’s cooling real-estate market has spawned communities on Reddit and Facebook where people cheer every time a pricey property sells at a big loss. Take this Junction home that was listed for nearly $4 million but appears to have sold for just $1.8 million, thanks in part to what r/HouseSigmaBlunders commenters described as a flip job done by “overpaid parasites.” Mean-spirited? You bet! But UBC policy professor Paul Kershaw told the Toronto Star he sees a silver lining: if Canada has finally kicked its “cultural addiction” to rising home prices, maybe more folks will finally be able to afford one. For the billionth time, stop micromanaging your stock portfolio! It’s a golden rule of long-term investing for good reason. A new study by Morningstar found that investors who meddle in their holdings — often by buying high and selling low — underperform the market by 18% over a 30-year period. In concrete terms, the average meddler who starts with $30,000 would earn $51,000 less over that horizon than a hands-off investor. So if you’ve forgotten the password to your trading account, you might be on the right track. INTERESTING You’re not crazy: flight delays are getting longer. Econ Substacker Maxwell Tabarrok, of Maximum Progress, charted trends in flight arrival times and found that catastrophic delays (more than three hours late) are 4.5 times more frequent now than in 1990. The chief culprit is congestion: the number of flyers has nearly doubled since 2000, but no major airports and few runways have been added. So while last week’s news that WestJet plans to buy 67 new planes might sound like progress, remember: all those planes need to take off and land somewhere, and Canada hasn’t added a new runway since 2014. (It was in Calgary, btw.) The future of superfast wifi is glass straws. From the Department of Neato: researchers at a Microsoft-owned startup have developed a new fibre-optic cable with the potential to transmit data 45% faster than current materials. Data gets whisked through cables on beams of light, whereas current cables use solid-glass strands. According to an article in Nature Photonics, the firm’s “glass straw” fibres replace the solid glass with hollow tubes, and light travels faster through air than glass, meaning (in theory) much faster service. Just not on your phone. Your service will always be lousy. —Sarah Rieger FROM OUR SPONSOR THE FOMO INDEX by Stacey Woods IMPORTANT 🏥 Health minister says Saskatoon no longer needs 24-hour urgent care. Apparently, “urgent” has many meanings, including “during business hours.” Source 🤖 Elon Musk predicts Optimus robots will soon make up 80% of Tesla’s value. They already make up 100% of his Saturday nights. Source ☕️ Starbucks launching Protein Lattes and Protein Cold Foam. They’re the perfect accompaniment to your afternoon Fibermaxxuccino. Source 🌎 Exciting news: new ranking names Canada the 10th smartest country in the world. Less exciting news: number nine is Australia. Source CRASH & BURN TO THE MOON 🎤 Morrissey is selling his interest in The Smiths. Make him an offer, assuming you still hold your interest in Morrissey. Source 👕 Shein uses Luigi Mangione’s AI-generated likeness on their website. Bot likely misheard prompt for “fast-fashion shirt” as “assassin twerp.” Source 💔 After a decade together, Kraft Heinz is splitting up. But they remain committed to working together in the best interest of the Lunchables. Source 🚗 Uber Eats will now also deliver from Best Buy. Grab a GoPro to watch yourself eat your cheeseburger. Source WHO CARES THE BIG IMPORTANT STORY DEPT. OF CURSES September Tends to Be Horrific for Stocks. Should Investors Be Alarmed? If you’ve ventured into the finance-nerd corners of the internet recently, you’ve likely noticed some alarming posts about the “September effect” — aka the “September curse” — an anomaly where stocks often nose-dive at the start of fall. Last Monday, as stocks sank, all sorts of accounts jumped at the chance to point out that September has historically been the absolute worst month of the year for stocks by a comfortable margin, as a way of coyly suggesting, Uh-oh, here comes trouble! Buckle up! So is September really terrible for equities? Would investors be better off sitting on the sidelines until October? Let’s discuss! The September effect: fact or fiction? The September curse is indeed real. Since 1928, the U.S. S&P 500, the most traded and consequential stock index, has fallen 1.2% on average in the month. (Equities in Canada, Hong Kong, and the U.K. have sunk, too.) Compare that to February, stocks’ second-worst month historically, which has a much milder 0.1% average decline. (FWIW: July leads with a +1.7% average.) The economist Jeremy J. Siegel calculated just how rotten September has been in his book Stocks for the Long Run. He found that US$1 invested in U.S. stocks in 1885 would have grown to $1,428 by the end of 2021 (excluding dividends). Which might seem good! But had you skipped September, your money would have swelled to $6,167 over that time — a difference of $4,739. On the flip side, had you invested only in September over those 136 years, your $1 would have declined to $0.23. So, it’s unwise to invest in September, right? If only life were so simple! Don’t get us wrong: we cannot tell you what any one month holds for markets. It could be lousy. But September’s rotten performance owes mostly to several truly catastrophic events that have, probably by chance, occurred in the month. In 1929, the U.S. stock market slipped in late September before crashing a month later. Then, in September 1974, the S&P tumbled almost 10%, following the OPEC oil embargo. Next came the 21st-century flukes: after the dot-com bubble popped in early 2000, markets sailed south before getting rocked by 9/11. Then Lehman Brothers imploded in September 2008, throwing global finance into turmoil. And, finally, in September 2022, the S&P gave up 9.3%, as central banks jacked up interest rates. People have tried to blame September’s poor performance on tax-loss harvesting, investor psychology, and other such factors. But none of the catalysts for the sell-offs of yore have much to do with seasonality; the universe mostly seems to have conspired against the month. And not all Septembers have been bad: U.S. and Canadian stocks climbed 2% last September. And American stocks had a positive September in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Here’s the broader point: In his book, Siegel notes that another phenomenon known as the January effect, wherein small stocks outperform the broader market at the start of the year, was a real thing throughout much of the 20th century. But from 1995 to 2021, it vanished, as have other anomalies; Mondays were once lousy trading days, but no longer. The takeaway? Of all the things that investors should focus on, seasonal trends or anomalies probably shouldn’t be a big one, since these phenomena don’t occur reliably. Your energies are likely better spent maximizing your earning potential, focusing on company fundamentals, and ensuring your portfolio matches your risk tolerance and goals. Boring but true! —Jared Sullivan OTHER VERY GOOD READS 🚂 Empire of Steel: CP Rail A deep dive into Canada’s founding myth. | The Hatchet 🩺 My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek Why the sick and lonely are turning to AI. | rest of world 🛍️ Too Many Sales, Not Enough Ssense The fall of Canada’s favourite fashion retailer. | Glossy THE WISDOM OF SOCIAL “It looks like you’re trying to sleep. Do you need some help with that?” THOUGHTS ON TODAY’S ISSUE? Love it Good So so This week’s newsletter contributors: Devin Gordon (writer), Stacey Woods (writer), Sarah Rieger (news writer), Ambrose Martos (fact checker), Maude Campbell (copy editor), Sara Black McCulloch (fact checker), Mohini Tailor (lifecycle marketing manager), Eva Grace Clement Cruz (lifecycle marketing associate), Setareh Sarmadi (senior editorial producer), Matthew Karasz (markets editor), Jared Sullivan (senior editor), Peter Martin (senior editor), and Devin Friedman (editor-in-chief). 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